In US political circles a stalking-horse is defined as a candidate put forward by one group to divide the opposition or mask the candidacy of another person for whom the stalking-horse would then withdraw. So Jean Hunter, a Wisconsin lady now living in Dublin, informs me. She wants to know more about this stalking-horse.

In Shakespeare's time, this was a horse or a figure like a horse, behind which a fowler concealed himself from the sight of the game he was following; hence, figuratively, anything put forward to conceal some other important move. Shakespeare himself used the word in As You Like It: "He uses his folly like a stalking-horse, / And under the presentation of that he shoots his wit."

I came upon the following in Shakespeare's contemporary, Gervase Markham's History of Fowling: "The stalking-horse is any old jade trayned up for that use, which will gently walke vp and downe in the water; and then you shall shelter your selfe and your Peice behind his fore shoulder. Now forasmuch as these stalking-horses are not euer in readinesse, in this case he may take any peices of oulde canvasse, and hauing made it in the shape or proportion of a horse, let it be painted as neere the colour of a Horse as you can deuise."

The figurative use of the word appeared in literature in 1612, when the dramatist, Webster, wrote in The White Devil: "You were made his engine, and his stalking-horse, To undo my sister." It looks as if the word was a favourite among authors who wrote about hanky-panky. Our own Congreve, in his Double Dealer (1693), has: "Do you think her fit for nothing but to be stalking-horse to stand before you, while you take aim at my wife?" Well, I suppose it isn't such a long step to its use in political double dealing. The verb stalk, by the way, is from Middle English stalke, from an unattested Old English stealcian, implied in bistealcian, to walk cautiously, stealthily.

I have heard many an explanation of the origin of tip, verb, to give a gratuity to, and of the noun, but Pat Smyth, a leading wine expert, says that it stands for "to insure promptness. I don't think so, somehow. I must side with Oxford, which says it is 18th century slang, of unknown origin, first used in literature by Farquhar in 1706, and a quarter of a century later by Swift, who wrote of "tipping him with half a Crown". A decent skin.